EVE:A 15 Minute, 7 Step Beginner's Guide To Eve Online

This is a fairly comprehensive guide to get a newbie well and truly integrated into EVE Online with a very good change of having a great time.

The original source of this page can be found here. Additional information can be found in the comments section of the initial Reddit post.

Diving into EVE is a big task that leaves many newcomers feeling daunted. Naturally they look for advice, but with all the information available, new players often end up no less confused.

This guide is intended to be read and digested in 15 minutes, and it is intended to help new players to find a direction for the first few weeks. It doesn't address the technical questions: plenty of guides already do that. Instead it tackles the fuzzier questions that don't have single answers.

Contents

Step 1

Get a trial account, then if you're still interested after 2 weeks, get a 3 month subscription. 3 months is plenty of time to see what EVE has to offer without spending more than you would on an off-the-shelf game.

Step 2

Choose your starting race purely on aesthetics and lore. While the starting skills are slightly different, with just a few hours of skill training you can have any other race's starting skills.

Step 3

Do the tutorials! Follow them up with the Servant Sisters of EVE epic arc, the Blood Stained Stars.
They give excellent starting capital, including decent ISK, a range of frigates and a destroyer, and enough standing with all the factions to run level 2 missions rather than levels 1s (more rewards and they get you to even higher level missions faster). They also, naturally, run you through many of the tasks you'll want to do in-game.
While doing Step 3, which will take a few afternoons, also do the following 3 steps:

Step 4

Join the EVE University public channel in-game (E-UNI), where there are lots of players happy to answer questions, and bookmark their wiki, which is amazingly comprehensive. | EVE University Wiki Both are incredible resources even for non-members. The wiki also has a much more comprehensive starting guide.

Joining a channel: In the upper right corner of the chat window, just below the "minimize" button is speech cloud button that says "open channel window". Click it, then in the box under "channels" type the name of the channel you want, and finally click "join."

Step 5

Find a starting corp; it doesn’t have to be permanent. EVE is far more fun as a social game than a single-player game. Here are some good options:

No corp worth your time will ask for ISK or items to join! If they do, it's a scam. Most will provide you, the applicant, with resources for joining.

Step 6

Train the following sets of skills (not in any particular order, balance them):

Minmatar - guns, short and long range, fast, versatile, a little of everything

All the races are worthwhile, but the Minmatar have strong ships in all of the early classes (frigates through battlecruisers, and industrials), and their ships are versatile. They allow you to try out the major classes of weapons (gunnery, both long and short ranged, missiles, and drones) and the three methods of tanking (speed, armor, and shields). They also have the second best mining cruiser (the Scythe) and the second best industrial (the Mammoth) in the game, letting you try out non-combat professions.
In short, when it comes to trying everything, the Minmatar can't be beat. By skilling for their ships you can easily cross-train with the other, more specialized races in areas you find appealing. The drawback of this flexibility is that you have to train a wider range of skills to use their ships to the fullest.

Step 7

After you've done all the above, try out small gang PVP while also running missions, salvaging, trading, mining, industry, ratting, and/or exploration to pay the bills. This is the heart of the game, and the most common overall play-style. There are plenty of other niches, which you should try and may end up preferring, but if you don't like this core lifestyle, EVE probably isn't your game.
Beyond that, explore, experiment, meet people, die in a fire, make other people die in a fire, make asteroids die in a fire if that's your thing, but above all, have fun.
(Two decisions not to sweat: what NPC corp to grind standings with first (if you're a mission runner) and what system to base yourself in. There's plenty of time to figure these out, and the best answer will change with your circumstances.)

3 Rules to Enjoying EVE

Don't fly/buy/loan/build what you can't afford to lose.

In many MMO's, people buy that shiny item the moment they have just enough gold to do so. In EVE this is a very bad idea. Invest in things when you know how to use them properly and can afford to replace them.

Trust no one.

People will stab you in the back, scam you, and blow you up for fun. Luckily, dying in a fire is fun.

Do unto others.

Doing all those things listed above to other people is even more fun than having them done to you.

If WoW is Disney World, highly safe, saccharine, and precisely orchestrated fun, then EVE is a roadside carnival. It's a bit rickety, has as many scams as it does honest fun, has a seedy underbelly poking up above the surface (blatantly in some cases), but is all the more thrilling because it always feels like it's about to come apart at the seams.

Broski Visual Guides (30 amusing and useful guides to a collection of game mechanics) Warning: broski is a corp based from 4chan -- the mechanics in the guides are sound but expect 4chan style humor view at your own risk.